<IT WORLD> Web tangled in Iranian struggle
By Martin J Young
HUA HIN, Thailand - As Iranians attempt to come to terms with the outcome of
their recent presidential elections, battlelines are being drawn in cyberspace.
The combatants are the government in Tehran with its heavy-handed censorship of
the Internet and media in one corner and the ever-increasing numbers of
tech-savvy opposition supporters in the other.
Iran is up there with the likes of China, Vietnam, Thailand and North Korea
when it comes to Internet censorship prowess, all of which have in recent years
jailed Internet users and violated the rights of online free speech. Iran has
more than 20 million Internet users, ranking the country second only to Israel
in the Middle East in terms of the percentage of its population using the net.
Iran employs an advanced semantic filtering system in conjunction with an
official committee responsible for identifying
and reporting websites that violate the government's stringent guidelines.
These basically target all non-Islamic websites, women's websites, and any that
appear to be promoting Western cultural influences, such as movies and music.
Every Internet service provider must be approved by both the Telecommunication
Company of Iran and the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. An estimated
10 million websites have already been blocked, and that was before the recent
elections.
The media clampdown intensified as everyone from foreign correspondents to
Iranian students took to the Internet to spread the word and share the news as
events unfolded on the streets of Tehran this week. Social networking websites
such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube have become the favored
platforms of communication as tracking users on these is not an easy task. The
government's only option would be to follow in China's footsteps and block the
websites entirely, which it has done for a number of them.
The US government has taken an unusual step by calling on Twitter to delay
scheduled maintenance, which would cause a temporary suspension of service and
prevent Iranians sharing information. The move could highlight the Barack Obama
administration's acknowledgement of the power that social websites have in the
organization of protests and the flow of information.
Internet users across the globe have pledged to help Iranians avoid detection
and possible arrest by attempting to make it harder for the government to track
them. By using proxy servers, they are able to change their web addresses or
location settings to make it appear as if they are posting information from
outside Iran. This gives the Iranian Internet police a tough job in tracking
down the genuine bloggers living inside the country. Sympathizers are also
setting up their own proxies to help Iranians bypass government filters.
A proxy is essentially a web server or network that bridges the gap between the
user and the destination website by masking the Internet address of either
connection. By disguising the Internet address (IP) they can make the
connection appear anonymous and thus enable access to otherwise blocked
websites.
Popular websites themselves have offered support by providing software and
means to bypass the censors in Iran. The Pirate Bay, a high-traffic file
sharing site has offered support by temporarily changing its name to Persian
Bay and linking to a protest forum it helped to setup. The
forum "aims to be a secure and reliable way of communication for
Iranians and friends", and offers instructions on how to use proxy servers and
access the Internet anonymously along side advice from techies around the world
on circumnavigating government blocks.
Websites providing software to surf incognito such as the
Tor Project have seen surges in traffic this week and a slew of new
sites have appeared offering assistance. The
Global Internet Freedom Consortium, or GIF, also provides
anti-censorship software and has resumed services to Iran since the election
crisis. It predominantly serves China. "Due to the dynamic situation in Iran
caused by the election and its protest aftermath, the number of daily 'hits'
from Iran has tripled during the past week," said GIF deputy director Shiyu
Zhou. The site has experienced server overloads this week from a reported
400,000 unique users accessing it from Iran. GIF last year introduced a Farsi
language version of the Freegate software and usage has since surged.
Software solutions such as these have become popular throughout Asia in recent
years as more countries stifle the free flow of information over the Internet.
Martin J Young is an Asia Times Online correspondent based in Thailand.
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